Mohamed Mahmoud Pasha Digital Archive

"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity". For this, ISIS is keen on the preservation and documentation of Egyptian history through digitizing a huge collection of various resources related to the history of Egypt, all to build the "Memory of Modern Egypt". One of the collections related to this project are the documents pertaining to Mohamed Mahmoud Pasha. His documents contain very rich and rare historical materials that have never been published before.

About Mohamed Mahmoud Pasha
Mohamed Mahmoud Pasha is one of Egypt's most famous Prime Ministers. He held this position for four terms, forming his first government in 1928, and the last Cabinet in 1939. He was a unique personality among Egyptian political figures. Born to a political family, he received a distinguished education at Oxford University, where he specialized in history. He was one of three who were sent to exile in March 1919 with Saad Zaghloul, an event that was considered one of the most important causes of the 1919 revolution.

The digital archive
An agreement was finalized with Mohamed Mahmoud Pasha’s family to digitize the collection. Consequently, a team was formed and trained on the indexing of the picture collection, led by the Director of the BA Media Department. In addition, the workflow was designed, tested and deployed for the digitization of documents and pictures, associating them with their metadata, and incorporating the output into DAR.

Two units of digitization equipment were installed in Cairo along with the software developed for the project. Training of two specialists for scanning and entering the metadata also took place by ISIS. The pictures available in the 14 albums (592 pictures) were digitized and are currently being associated with their metadata by the Media Department. Moreover, 2,843 documents (5,786 pages) were completely digitized. The entire collection will be published soon through a browsing application featuring searching and navigation tools. The application will be invaluable to historians, politicians and researchers.